Our mission

Drishti’s mission is to “extend human potential in an increasingly automated world”. The first stop on our journey is the factory, where we’re committed to putting people at the center of the next industrial revolution.

Manufacturing is a $12 trillion global industry that is still using 100-year-old techniques to gather data on human actions inside factories. This creates a massive blind spot for companies, because people perform 72% of factory activities.

Drishti makes human beings visible to analytics. Our action recognition and AI innovations automatically digitize human actions inside the factory to create a massive new dataset. Manufacturers use Drishti to anchor true digital transformation, driving sweeping improvements in productivity, quality and traceability. And operators rely on Drishti to be more consistent and efficient, becoming even more valuable on the factory floor.

Meet Our Founders

Prasad Akella

Founder & CEO

Dr. Prasad Akella transformed manufacturing in the 1990s as leader of the General Motors team behind the world’s first collaborative robots (“cobots”), projected to be a $12 billion market by 2025. With cobots, Akella advanced robotics to safely amplify workers’ physical capabilities. With Drishti, Akella returns to the factory to again enhance workers’ capabilities—this time, by driving advances in computer vision and AI.

Krishnendu Chaudhury

Co-Founder & CTO

Dr. Krishnendu Chaudhury is one of the world’s foremost computer vision and deep learning experts. Over his 20+ year career, he’s been directly responsible for some of the most groundbreaking technical innovations in the history of Google, Flipkart and Adobe. Today, he’s charting and realizing a technical vision for digitizing human actions in real time: a challenge that’s pushing the boundaries of computer vision and deep learning even further.

Ashish Gupta

Co-Founder & Board Member

Dr. Ashish Gupta seeks unexplored problem spaces to grow large companies from seed. His career spans “firsts” that include unstructured data aggregation (Junglee), BPOs (Daksh, acquired by IBM), online travel in India (MMYT), and an Indian venture fund (Helion). At Drishti (the first AI to empower factory workers instead of displacing them), he is a part-time co-founder and active board member guiding the team on a journey he’s traveled before.

Meet Our Extended Family

Drishti’s technology was incubated at SRI International, the originator of some of Silicon Valley’s most world-changing inventions and one of the earliest proponents of technology’s capacity to enhance—not replace—human strengths. Multiple patents are pending.

We’re funded by Emergence Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and BGV. We’re supported by an SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation. Our early customers include global leaders in the automotive and electronics manufacturing space.

Join our team

We seek those who believe that technology’s purpose is to make people more capable. And who want to solve the world’s hardest problems… at scale.